The Lace Runner of Nottingham
A Novel of the Luddite Uprising

About this book:

In the frozen courts of 1812 Nottingham, twelve-year-old Hannah Weaver stitches wedding veils by dying candlelight—each perfect rose and ivy border a desperate bid for ninepence, a half-stone of flour, another week without the workhouse. Her fingers know the rhythm of the frame: *under two, over one, pull*. But beyond the garret window, the stocking frames of the men are falling silent, smashed in the night by masked figures who sign their threats "Ned Ludd." When Hannah's father vanishes into the frost-heavy alleys and a fifty-pound reward turns neighbors into informers, the lace in her basket becomes the least of what she must protect.

History remembers the Luddites as machine-breakers. *The Lace Runner of Nottingham* remembers the women and children who held the threads—girls who read the mesh by touch when the tallow gutters, mothers who choose which child eats the bacon fat, families sleeping four to a bed while the warehouse clocks tick out profits for masters who have never pricked a finger. From the reeking tanneries of Narrow Marsh to the brass-knockered doors of Bridlesmith Gate, Hannah navigates a world where a spoiled veil means starvation, a whispered name means the gallows, and the only safety lies in the pattern you keep running when the hammers fall.

Meticulously researched and fiercely human, this is historical fiction at its most immersive: a novel that smells of lanolin and coal smoke, that hears the *shhhk* of a brass needle and the *clack-clack* of pattens on ice-slick cobbles. For readers of *The Dressmaker of Paris* and *The Gilded Ones*, here is a story of resistance woven not in grand speeches but in the quiet, furious stitches that hold a life together when the frames come crashing down.